Joe Zane uses an exacting verisimilitude to create a trail of his own artist successes and failures. His body of work thus far includes a meticulously-crafted version of his own Phaidon monograph (image-heavy books printed by the UK-based publishers of well known artists), a video from the PBS contemporary art special Art21, a group of distinguished self portraits, and then a series of cracked mirrors with his signature etched in, as well as a pan-handling monkey.

Zane uses his dry and sometimes dark sense of humor to continue a century-long investigation of what an artist is and does. For Zane and many others from Samuel Beckett to John Baldessari, a large part of that answer is to fail. In creative endeavors that involve experimentation, from the arts to the sciences, to achieve any type of discovery requires a good amount of rejection and basic failure. It is the gap between intention and realization that proves the largest and most fertile expanse for failure to exist. As Beckett pointed out, “to be an artist is to fail as no other dare to fail.¹